Self-deception might help with motivation but…

It will cost your good judgement - and leaders are supposed to have good judgement

In what is likely to be a repeated theme here, I’m a bit behind schedule on a new posting - in addition to life, I’ll admit the ongoing war in Ukraine is hard to set aside so that I can focus on the destructive feedback loops of Congress as Part 2 of my prior post. And my vast army of a dozen readers (not even dozen plural!) probably demand content, but I can’t seem to stop thinking through some of the issues that led to the situation in Europe, particularly energy policy. Rather than a chart and graph extravaganza with all sorts of statistics on the EU’s energy policies, I figured I’d take another tack, so here we go:

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You’ve probably seen the various self-help mantras, stickers, needlepoints, and Instagram posts with “inspiring” sayings like: If you are dedicated and you want it bad enough, you CAN achieve your goal! Odds are excuses to give up - you’ve got to keep going! Most people who jump off this bridge fall to their death, BUT you may be the first human to FLY!¹

I’ve hated this pabulum with a passion as long as I can remember. I played sports in college - At one point, prior to one of the biggest games in the program’s history and my amateur “career”, I vividly remember thinking: “This team is much better than us, and we’ll need to play a nearly perfect game in order to win” while the bulk of the team madly screamed about how we were going to win, and captains gave “inspirational” speeches along those lines. I felt like such an outsider and had to work hard not to roll my eyes out of my head. Oh, and we lost. Badly.

I knew that these motivational sayings or speeches made no rational sense, but since they were only a minor annoyance I tended to just ignore them and move on. It’s not like someone’s ridiculous motivational poster actually has negative consequences - If they trick themselves into believing it might even be helpful to get them going, right?

This is in the forefront of my mind as I’m working through the wonderful Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef². The book is about how the human desire to be right can often lead to thinking about things in a way that actually make us more likely to be wrong. In short, Scouts try their damndest to see the world as it is in order to make better decisions, while Soldiers adopt and defend beliefs, using motivated reasoning as offensive and defensive weaponry. The Scout mindset, she argues, takes some work but is usually vastly superior.

Among other things, she digs into how and why we tend to use self-deception to find motivation. Galef pushes back against the idea that this self-deception is actually needed to cope with modern life. In fact, she argues that the risks of the self-deception far outweigh whatever emotional benefit gained by lying to yourself. She also points out that while self-deception can occasionally cause happiness, there is certainly a cost. It so happens that while self-deception might make you feel better, as Galef points out:

“It [self-deception] just comes with the downside of eroding your judgement. And given that there are so many ways to cope that don’t involve self-deception, why settle?”

The glorious “This is fine” meme

So what does this have to do with Ukraine?

John Kerry, the current U.S. Climate Envoy, and former Secretary of State, in a recent interview worried over the worried over the potential impacts on emissions goals that the war in Ukraine may have. He also lamented, with regard to invasion, that “I thought we lived in a world that said ‘no’ to that kind of activity.” ³ In other words, he thought Western nations (including their leaders & the people that inhabit them) just didn’t do war anymore - it’s passé, is it not?

Obviously, he’s incredibly wrong, and not just in terms of terrible political timing to be complaining about emissions impacts - he is managing to be wrong at the intersection of both foreign policy and energy policy, his theoretical realms of expertise.⁴ We’ll never know exactly why Putin felt he could pull off an invasion of Ukraine but European energy policy clearly was an enabling factor. I’ll spare you the graph filled energy policy dissertation (for now), but to summarize really quickly - in the pursuit of climate and environmental goals the EU has:

• Been actively closing nuclear plants, mostly to offset with renewables that don’t provide base load

• Increasing it’s dependence on outside providers of energy fuels to nearly 60% (and higher for oil and gas)

• Making sure Russia is the primary drug dealer energy provider, with an increased market share over the past 10 years

• Increased energy prices across the board⁵ (~280% higher than in the US for electricity at the end of 2021!)

• Short run shortages expected to spike an average households annual electricity and heating bill 50% when comparing 2021 to 2022

Without all of these things going on, Putin’s calculus looks a lot different - and even if it didn’t change Russian actions vis a vis Ukraine, the available sanctions and diplomatic response would be vastly different.

But what’s this have to do with the Scout mindset and self-deception?

If you become one of those people convinced that you are a unicorn on the inside⁶ and start attending furry conventions or whatever - Weird, but as long as you’re doing it on your own time and still defecate indoors, it really won’t do too much to the rest of the world. Point being - deceiving yourself into thinking you are a dog doesn’t really matter, since most people’s judgement doesn’t affect us all that much. Have fun!

However, when you are the former Secretary of State and the current Climate Envoy, I’m unfortunately forced to assume that your judgement has some impact on the world, so now I have to care. The key point leaders need to remember is this: The more consequential your decisions might be, the more important it is to avoid self-deception, and to see things as they really are. I could easily fill a book with recent examples of failures to follow this maxim.⁷

In this case, the European energy alarm has been raised for years, but there has always been a comforting lie ready at hand: “Even if gas is just a transition fuel, perhaps we could use fracking and increase our local supply?” is met with “No! Shale gas is scary, these will be stranded assets, and will lower gas prices⁸, plus we have pipelines for the transition.”

Alternatively: “We’re putting ourselves at the mercy of Russian pipelines, with Vladimir Putin’s hand on the spigot!” is met with “Russia isn’t a risk anymore the Cold War is over, and even if they are, don’t worry we’re transitioning away from gas anyway.” And so on…

It isn’t just the E.U. Of course: Here in the U.S. we have, on the one hand, the current administration repeatedly moving against domestic oil and gas production while, on the other hand, repeatedly asking OPEC+⁹ to pump more oil for us to buy.

Setting an aspirational emissions reduction goal, and then running forward with a plan that includes putting blinders on to ignore reality is not only counterproductive, but dangerous. People are already noticing price spikes - if you combine price increases, geopolitical instability, and the schizophrenic nature of increased fossil imports while slowing domestic production and shuttering nuclear plants, the necessary political will to take even measured and reasonable steps can evaporate quickly.

In the end…

John Kerry is going to learn that he got one thing right: the situation in Ukraine is going to be very bad for future emissions reductions. In Europe this month, we are also learning that self-deception about the nature of humanity and the cold reality of energy markets will have real costs. In this case, those costs now go well beyond the financial to include human lives - so we’ve crossed over into the realm of tragedy.

1. One of these is probably inaccurate.

2. Highly recommended, even if you’re already pretty familiar with thinking in bets, rationality “stuff”, decision making studies, etc. Several portions I’ve skimmed (calibrating estimates, for example), but the heuristics and simple presentations of ideas or concepts has helped clarify some of these ideas in a more useable and easy to remember way. PLUS she cleverly uses Spock as a cautionary tale quite a few times. The odds you won’t like it are almost zero!

3. He also, and not inaccurately, worried that these events will be harmful to the climate movement and reduce the focus on emissions reduction. More on that below.

4. I can’t help but beat the dead horse and point out that foreign policy would presumably line up pretty well with being the Secretary of State, while energy policy would seem to be something a climate envoy should understand fairly well… I won’t point out a similar issue with regard to political timing, because to paraphrase Coach Denny Green: “He is who we thought he was.”

5. German retail electricity prices were around $0.35 Euro/kWh before the crisis - or nearly $0.40/kWh in USD. The average retail electricity price here in the US is about $0.14 /kWh right now. This has massive impacts, not only to people at home, but any kind of energy intensive business or manufacturing. The bill needs to get paid somehow, so this gets passed right into whatever the product may be - and if you have global competition or substitutes available in an energy intensive industry, you are screwed…

6. or, more likely, pretending to be convinced that you are in fact a Dachsund.

7. It’s also important to keep in mind the differences in roles: a campaign speechwriter is not an advertising writer who is not a press secretary who is not the President, etc…

8. One of the admittedly interesting things I’ve seen in recent years is a reversal of opinion among some environmental advocates about the role of prices in the transition away from fossil fuels: when prices rose in the 2000’s it was said to be a good thing, because higher prices would mean less consumption. Of course, along with innovation, it also incentivized more oil & gas production. So, with prices low in the recent past (remember WTI oil going negative what felt like 100 years ago?), the talking point became “low prices are signs that there is divestment from oil and gas, even though production is increasing steadily”. Now we’re back in the high price scenario, so I guess we’ll get see if we really do live in Pangloss’s Perfect Oil Price for a Just Transition Emporium, and the rhetoric flips again. The cynic in me says yes - they “need” to self-deceive in order to sell donors that any given environmental group is both: a worthwhile and effective advocate for the cause that gets results AND that things are still really bad, possibly doomed if we don’t ask fast, so please send money now.

9. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the little “+” there is Russia.